Be warned: the following article contains major spoilers for the first and second acts of We Happy Few.

The first time you encounter Sally Boyle, We Happy Few's second playable character, it's through the eyes of a man. She strikes a dainty figure at the end of an alleyway, slick and trim in black latex and white felt, a jockey's helmet puckishly screwed down over thickly made-up elvish features. Within the game's 1960s British dystopia, Sally has become a sex and fashion icon, cast in the image of starlets like Edie Sedgwick, her apartment decorated with Pop Art prints of her own face. She's like something out of a fever dream, delightful yet abrasive and you sense, as reliable as the wind, hanging off your arm as she teases you about your clothes.

Sally's ditziness isn't entirely her own doing, however: the scene is as much a commentary on Arthur, the hapless dork doing the looking, as it is Sally. One of We Happy Few's more inspired tricks is that its protagonists perceive conversations with each other differently, the pulse of their emotions altering what is said and how. In the course of three parallel stories, played one after the other, you witness the same cutscenes from each perspective, with altered wording, performances and animations. It's tempting to say that there's no definitive account, but to my mind, the steady unfurling of the theme of censorship in Arthur's story (he once worked for the state's Department of Archives, Printing, & Recycling) makes his the least trustworthy. His impressions of Sally, specifically, are soured by resentment: the pair grew up together as foster siblings and were almost sweethearts, but fell apart when Arthur's dad coerced Sally into sleeping with him.

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Ahead of this evening's E3 conference, a new page on the Microsoft store confirms details and pricing for the Xbox Game Pass on PC for Windows 10 players: 4 GBP / $5 USD a month.

The pass includes a library of 100+ games to dip into (although it should be noted that the library on Xbox One is almost double that) including We Happy Few, Forza Horizon 4, Hello Neighbor, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Sea of Thieves Anniversary Edition, and State of Decay 2.

Gears 5, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, and Ori and the Blind Forest are listed as "coming soon" to the PC library.

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"Come on. Lighten up. Have a whiff."

It's late into Cyberpunk 2077's demo when Dum-Dum extends a claw toward V, offering a hit from a skull-adorned inhaler. Perhaps sensing the veiled hostility behind the supposed peace pipe being thrust under her nose, she obliges. Arachnid eye implants shine through a red haze. Dum-Dum takes his own hit, and flared nerves settle. Between all the talk of cred chips and bots, the tension that fuels this choice stems from a ritual as old as time. Breaking bread. Chinking cups. Passing the proverbial Dutchie to the left.

Adult games, as a medium, are often enamoured with their own portrayal of taboo subjects, but there's a streak of silently judgemental conservatism dulling the libertine sheen. By confining their use to grim settings, these stories condemn altered states of consciousness as the territory of society's dregs. At the same time, they're perfectly happy to hijack their aesthetics when it suits. Unexamined praise can be as useless as uninformed panic, of course, but let's be clear here: games are, for the most part, shit at doing drugs properly. Here's a brief history of drug use in games.

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For a British person of a certain age, playing We Happy Few is like being spoonfed your own sick. I intend this entirely as praise. To be more specific, it's like being spoonfed sick originally vommed up by King Arthur and stored in a vase for centuries at Windsor Palace, chewed over by Winston Churchill, shipped to the New World alongside the Beatles and Pythons and hereby returned to us with sprinkles on top by Canadian studio Compulsion Games. By "sick" I of course mean Great British culture, that terrible extent of table manners, bucolic landscapes, desperate irony and colonial nostalgia that has come to serve as a key export in the absence of our old manufacturing industry.

An uneven yet fascinating first-person role-player that mingles elements of immersive sim design with open world survival mechanics, We Happy Few is a love letter to all this, and - well, let's just say the letter isn't written in ink. Set in the cheerily nightmarish, procedurally generated township of Wellington Wells during an alternate history in which World War 2 ended rather differently, it's a dystopian compilation of British traditions - the keep-calm-and-carry-on ethic of the Forties, the fledgling consumer culture of the Fifties, the sugary tunes and hedonism of the Sixties. Riffing on the films of Stanley Kubrick and Terry Gilliam, the portrayal is absurd, fulsome, both dainty and menacing, with all manner of sceptred arcana popping through the seams of its tweed jacket as it brings a cudgel squarely down on your face.

Head to the Parade District, the game's most affluent area, and you'll find candystripe roads, stooped cobblestone houses and tar-beamed pubs tucked in amongst modern residences with space age furniture. Citizens - their high spirits and homogeneity ensured by mandatory white masks - play hopscotch, cuddle on benches, march up and down jauntily with elbows akimbo, trade morsels of village gossip. Did you know the circus is coming to town? Have you heard about Constable Rossetti's wife's cake? In amongst them you'll find the Bobbies, all crocodile grins and Slenderman proportions, ever ready with a hat-tip and a "right as rain, sir, right as rain". Venture outside at night, not that any true Brit would ever violate curfew, and you'll hear them whistling God Save The Queen as they comb the fog for undesirables.

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Developer Compulsion Games has announced its post-launch content plans for drug-fuelled dystopian nightmare We Happy Few, including three new story episodes for season pass owners and a free sandbox survival mode.

Sandbox Mode is set to arrive as a free update following We Happy Few's release this Friday, August 10th, and is described as a highly customisable "infinite mode". You'll be able to tweak a whole range of parameters prior to embarking on a bout of survival adventuring, adjusting the size of the world, how deadly it is, the amount of food available, and more. It's even possible to play as one of the game's policeman-like Wellies.

In other words, Sandbox Mode sounds very much like the open-ended, procedurally generated survival experience that We Happy Few was originally envisaged as at the start of its development, and the game that initially released on Steam early access in 2016. Since then, of course, Compulsion has changed tack, and the final release will offer a much more structured, narrative-heavy experience, similar to that implied by the eye-catching announcement trailer.

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The Australian Classification Board has announced that, following a successful appeal by publisher Gearbox, Compulsion Games' psychedelic dystopian adventure We Happy Few will now receive a R 18+ classification, enabling the game to be sold in the country.

Back in May, We Happy Few was refused a classification in Australia, effectively banning it from sale, after it fell foul of the ratings board's strict policies on drug use in games. The board claimed that its drug-use mechanic, which can make progress easier in some circumstances, "constitutes an incentive or reward for drug-use and therefore, the game exceeds the R 18+ classification that states, 'drug use related to incentives and rewards is not permitted'".

In response, Compulsion Games noted that We Happy Few's "overarching social commentary is no different than Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, or Terry Gilliam's Brazil", highlighting that the game unfolds in a world where use of the drug Joy is mandated by the authorities, and that "the whole point of the game is to reject this programming and fight back".

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UPDATE 24/5/18: The Australian Classification Board has released a new statement, more fully explaining its reasoning for refusing to classify Compulsion Games' upcoming dystopian survival adventure We Happy Few, effectively banning it from sale in the country.

As expected, it's the game's depiction of drugs that has fallen foul of the board's strict rules. The board believes that We Happy Few's "drug-use mechanic making game progression less difficult constitutes an incentive or reward for drug-use and therefore, the game exceeds the R 18+ classification that states, 'drug use related to incentives and rewards is not permitted'".

To support its point, the board highlights the fact that "If a player has not taken Joy, NPCs become hostile towards the player if they perform behaviours including running, jumping and staring. An NPC character called the Doctor can detect when the player has not taken Joy and will subsequently raise an alarm. A player that takes Joy can reduce gameplay difficulty, therefore receiving an incentive by progressing through the game quickly."

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Developer Compulsion Games has confirmed that its jovial 1960s-inspired dystopian survival game We Happy Few will no longer release on April 13th as was previously announced, and is now delayed until "this summer". Its Early Access programme will also be suspended.

We Happy Few was revealed in 2015, and entered Steam Early Access in 2016 following a successful Kickstarter campaign. It's enjoyed regular updates since then, and is now, says Compulsion, "content complete". However, after "a thorough review of the game, beginning to end", the developer has decided to delay final release on PC, PS4, and Xbox One, in order to improve its structure and flow - as discussed in the video update below.

Alongside the delay, Compulsion has also announced that it's taking steps to address complaints around We Happy Few's controversial price hike last year - when the game rose from 23 to almost 40 following the decision to partner with Gearbox as publisher.

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